It was a long time since we had played such games; thinking about this made my eyebrows twitch. They felt so brittle I thought they were possibly going to drop off. It was a peculiar sensation, and I wondered if I didn't have some disease of the skin or hair follicles. If I went bald and lost my eyebrows it would be terrible.
I arrived home some hours later. I was exhausted, but like Dickens I have always loved to walk and some afternoons would walk a good ten miles. My apartment, the sublet from which I was being evicted, looked just as terrible as when I had gone out earlier—worse, even, for there was a foul reek of something fecund and feline, like the stench of old lion spore upon the veldt.
Turning on the lights I noticed a curled black pile on top of the messy bedclothes, and on closer inspection I realized some animal had performed its ablutions right in the middle of the bed: animal, human, or supernatural.
A kind of omen, perhaps—but who would be so deranged as to inform me in such blatant fashion that they thought I was full of shit? The being had climbed on top of my desk and scattered papers everywhere. A pool of bright yellow piss was not even dried. Was I to take this as coming from some being from another world? There was no sign of a real entity.
"Jesus Christ," I said. I couldn't even deal with it; without looking around any further to examine the desecration that had taken place in my absence, I went into the bathroom. But before I even flicked on the light, I noticed two toffee-colored eyes glaring near the toilet. Rather than look further, I clasped my hands over my eyes, and strangely they were freezing and clammy cold.
Then the creature let out a yowl. It must have been some kind of a cat—well, if it was a cat sent from Satan, then probably it would disappear under fluorescent lights. So I turned on the switch, with my eyes still covered.
Then I looked. It was a cat, a malevolent animal weighing at least twenty-five pounds, with a tough, stumpy muzzle and ears built low and small like a fighter. It was standing on the edge of the toilet seat. What it was doing there was hard to fathom: perhaps drinking from the joyous pot, perhaps ready to take a dive into the sewers. I took a step forward and the damn thing hissed at me—a cat that was part-snake, with a set of fangs inside its mouth that were quite unnecessary. "I have no desire to tangle with you," I said.
Meanwhile, I was growing very nervous unto myself. I had never seen such a malicious animal. Maybe it had rabies. It examined me as if I were some kind of intruder. It balanced on three legs, while it raised the fourth, clawed and vicious, in my direction. "Indeed, I suspect you are from the Other World," I told it. "But whether that Other World is sacred or profane I wish you would clue me in." For the cat has always been a sign of the devil, at the same time an animal worshiped by the ancient Egyptians.
But the cat did not respond. While talking to it, I backed out of the bathroom and sat down on the broken chair in the kitchen, before I remembered it was broken. I got tangled up in the cane seating and sprang to my feet, thinking maybe there were two cats now and I had sat on the second.
And then had to defibrillate my sweater threads from the chair caning.
How had the damned animal gotten into my place? Possibly through the broken window in the bathroom, above the fire escape. This was my territory it had invaded, bringing with it no doubt fleas and disease, perhaps even bubonic plague. Was I to be put out of my place even before my eviction notice was up by this vituperative alley cat?
I decided to ignore the problem. It occurred to me I might read for a little while, huddled under the blankets. The place was freezing cold: murder was in my thoughts, for I had murderous intentions toward the landlord, Vardig, who never bothered to heat the building and did such a poor job at repairing broken windows that a stinking cat could slink in. This was the reason I hadn't paid my rent in so many months, but because of this the old goat Vardig had managed to present me with an eviction notification.
Well, I have always had that skill of being able to escape my immediate surroundings by diving into a book; but tonight the book I was reading didn't hold my full interest. Which was odd, because I was normally totally absorbed by any book about insects. I was in the middle of a chapter about how wood ants feed their grubs. In return for food the grubs exude a glandular fluid. This stuff is pleasurable beyond belief to the workers who feed them. It was all part of a mutual exchange system. Why couldn't I accomplish the same thing with Ginger, the art dealer who handled my painting sales? Wherein Ginger, the grub, would get food, and I, the worker, would get pleasure. But all that seemed to be happening in our relationship was that I was working and she was getting the pleasure of handling my paintings.
While I was thinking about this Sherman came knocking at the door, carrying a bottle of Stolichnaya. "Listen," I said. "I've been reading this book."
Sherman leaned his crutches against the wall and cleared a space on the couch to sit down. "Oh, my underarms," he said, rubbing his pits.
"These grubs exude a fluid so important to the workers that the grubs are beyond measure in value to them."
"What grubs?"
"Ants," I said. "If there's a battle, or if the colony is attacked, the baby grubs are the first thing to be saved. This ensures the future of the colony."
"I can't walk anymore, my arms are so sore. How about getting us a couple of glasses for the vodka?"
I went over to the sink and tried to find a couple of coffee cups that weren't broken. "At first I was thinking how the worker ants are like the artists, and the art dealers are like the grubs. But on second thought, artists are the highest symbols of man's civilization, right?"
"Oh, sure," Sherman said bitterly.
"So they should be the first to be saved, for example, in the case of a nuclear disaster. But that's not how it would happen. In this country the first ones to be saved would be the politicians and the corporate executives, and lastly the lunatics who have been building shelters."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Sherman said, opening the bottle and pouring the vodka into the two cups.
"Well, what I'm saying is, this would be the equivalent of the worker ants struggling to save their own hides, without remorse or thought for the future."
"Do ants have hides?" Sherman said. "Jesus, Marley, what smells in here? Do you have a cat or something?" He took a swallow of his vodka, and limped over to his crutches. "Where's the light in your bathroom?" he said.
"Wait, don't go in there!" I said. But it was already too late: I heard the proud war chortle of the cat, and a yowl out of Sherman; I rushed into the bathroom to find the cat had leapt off the back of the toilet and had thrown itself at Sherman's neck.
"What the hell hit me?" Sherman said. I grabbed him from behind and pulled him out of the bathroom; his crutches fell to the floor. The cat had managed to sink its claws into the side of Sherman's neck, pointillistic dots of blood were now appearing. "There's some kind of demon in there!" he said.
"I tried to tell you," I said. We stood at the doorway of the bathroom, I switched on the hall light. The cat was now standing on the edge of the bathtub. That animal was a fighter, heavy in the testicles, torn up in the ears and a big scab across its nose, which made me wary. He gave Sherman and me a superior gangster glance, proud and condescending. Resembling as he did Baby Face Nelson, full of gism and loathing.
"Let's go finish our drinks," I said.
"Wait a minute," Sherman said. "My crutches are in there, I can't go anywhere without them."
"Well, I'm not going in there to get them," I said. I slung Sherman's arm around my neck and helped him back to the couch. Meanwhile we guzzled two cups of vodka in rapid succession, attempting to recover from the shock.